Greek letters.
The full Greek alphabet, lowercase and uppercase — tap any letter to copy it.
Lowercase
Uppercase
Where Greek letters show up
Greek letters are everywhere in maths, science and engineering: π for pi, Σ for a sum, Δ for change, λ for wavelength, μ for micro, Ω for ohms, θ for an angle. They also appear in statistics (σ, β), finance (alpha and beta, often written out), and as names for everything from fraternities to software releases. Each one here is a real Unicode character, so it copies cleanly into documents, equations and slides. If you need the matching mathematical operators (∑, √, ∞) to go with them, the math symbols page has those.
The lookalike traps
Several Greek letters have near-identical twins elsewhere in Unicode, and picking the wrong one causes problems that are invisible until something breaks — a search that finds nothing, a sort that misorders, a database lookup that misses.
- μ vs µ. Greek small mu is U+03BC; the micro sign is U+00B5. They render the same but are different characters. Use the micro sign in units (µm, µs) and Greek mu in mathematics.
- Ω vs Ω. Greek capital omega is U+03A9; the ohm sign is U+2126. Unicode now recommends the Greek letter for both, and normalisation converts the ohm sign to it.
- Α Β Ε Ζ Η Ι Κ Μ Ν Ο Ρ Τ Υ Χ are Greek capitals that look exactly like Latin A B E Z H I K M N O P T Y X but are distinct characters.
If two strings look identical but refuse to match, this is almost always the reason.
Final sigma
Greek is unusual in giving one letter two lowercase forms. σ (U+03C3) is used everywhere except at the end of a word, where ς (U+03C2), "final sigma", takes over. The capital is Σ (U+03A3) in both cases.
This matters if you are setting actual Greek text rather than mathematical notation. In maths, σ is conventional throughout — for standard deviation, for a stress tensor, for the Stefan–Boltzmann constant — and final sigma does not appear. Σ, meanwhile, is the summation operator, which is a mathematical use of the capital rather than a letter in a word.
Typing them
- HTML entities are named after the letters:
ππ,σσ,ΣΣ,ΔΔ,λλ,θθ,ΩΩ. Capitalising the entity name gives the capital letter. - Microsoft Word converts a code point to its character with
Alt + X, so typing3c0then Alt + X produces π. - LaTeX uses backslash names —
\pi,\Sigma,\Delta— and many editors and note apps now accept the same shorthand. - Linux:
Ctrl + Shift + U, then the hex code and Enter.
For the operators that usually accompany these letters, the math symbols page has ∑, √, ∫ and the rest.